Huawei makes divorce from Android official with HarmonyOS NEXT launch | Hacker News Reader

Huawei makes divorce from Android official with HarmonyOS NEXT launch

theregister.com

137 pointsrustyparkour144 comments

The article doesn't mention but it seems pretty relevant, Google kicked them from having the Play store etc on their phones a little while back as a result of political pressure so there's really no reason for them to care about Android any more.

I own a Huawei tablet and yes there is no Play Store. The Huawei app store also will link you to several third party sketchy apk stores.

The article explicitly cites it in the second last paragraph. It was a bit more than political pressure, though: Huawei was added to the entity list and it would be a crime for US companies or citizens to do business with them.

That’s clearly not the case though?

A lot of Huawei gear is still installed and operating, as of today, in US telecom networks.

Even the pentagon is contracting with many companies using Huawei gear.

I guess it is a crime from the date they were added to the list, but not a crime to keep using devices purchased earlier.

Usage of their equipment is one thing, technology export to a blacklisted company is another.

The telecom providers arguably put quite some pressure to maintain such a distinction, since they purchased and paid for said equipment.

But for i.e. Google it would have been a crime to provide dedicated technology access (early-access code, Google Services, etc.) for Huawei to then integrate into their products.

It's a real shame, such a phone would be a win-win as far as google's code containing all the NSA backdoors and such, and Huwai's hardware containing all the CSA's hardware backdoors and such. Imagine the cyberspace wars and battles being fought in that phone in your pocket.

They’re not supposed to be running it!

There were specific orders to remove Huawei from the telecom network (but yeah they were not followed) in 2019.

It's a pretty big operation to purge all of that legacy gear, so the government made a multi-billion dollar fund to support the removal over time, and I believe gave them until 2025 to finish the purge. And even that isn't exhaustive: They can still operate it after the deadline, they'll just be restricted from various government subsidies and programs.

So the government didn't flip a switch and tell them to make it disappear. They expected it to be a staggered, eventual process.

I may be misremembering but I thought Google kicked them out even before, primarily because Huawei wanted to have only Huawei services and not Google services, which goes against Google’s terms.

I don't think so. I bought a Huawei P30 Pro on release date (March 2019), it had (and still has) Google services. On May 2019 the US ban came, and from there on, new models had no Google services.

Another great example of the US shooting itself in the foot. I guess if we get more competition, its better for the consumer.

How does this hurt the US?

that's a good question, this hurts the US by enabling China to decouple itself from the US. Thus Once they make their own OS and have apps joining in their own app store, they can expand their markets and compete on OS. It may seem ridiculous now, but in 10 years it will be a serious OS and you can have all the apps in a .apk file that exist on android already working on their OS. Everytime the US introduces a restriction you are making them self sufficient(see how they are making their own Chips and own space station because of restriction on ISS) which in the long term is more sustainable for a country since they are not dependent on other countries and international order if things go really bad a self sufficient country is on top(see China is the sole manufacturing superpower by from the center of economic policy research).

tbh I like the idea of a multipolar world - a lot of our biggest achievements came as a result of the cold war.

it also forces some redundancy into the mechanisms of running a technological world - a disaster that affects one of the two or three polities may well leave enough stuff working that civilisation doesn't need to collapse completely.

a world where everything depends on everything else working correctly is a bit more fragile than I would like.

I think it's not clear which way that effect goes -- the Cold War was also the closest humanity has ever come to destroying itself. If all nations depend on each other, there's less nuclear conflict risk and less risk of war in general.

now that we've allowed Ukraine to suffer the consequences of trusting us with their defence in exchange for their old nukes, I expect nuclear proliferation to be inevitable and thus a nuclear exchange within our lifetimes isn't off the table. the worse is ahead of us, cold war or not.

This could be a ten year old post about Nordstream with a little tweaking. Autocracies will pursue their goals regardless of "coupling", China is not going to be influenced by whether the Google Play Store is available.

It may accelerate their decisions though.

All these things were gonna happen anyway. Or if not these things then China would aim to dominate in some other field. You think the capital allocated to these projects would otherwise sit idle?

I don’t see any problems here

1. After China made a turn toward authoritarianism with Xi, decoupling - especially on the telecom side - is a hard requirement. They are objectively a huge national security risk. 2. Competition is healthy. I don’t see any problems with having another space race or another OS competing on the international arena. 3. I’m not too worried about China threatening USA in the long run anyway. USA still attracts the best talent from all over the world, many of which end up settling there long term. (I’m not American, so saying this as an outsider). You cannot become a citizen in China, and that’s unlikely to change in an ultra-nationalist authoritarian leadership. There’s so many factors (ultra-nationalism, changing demographics, less foreign investments, capital flight, overhead of doing everything themselves) that is slowly eroding Chinas economy.

China is trying to learn the lessons from the fall of USSR as well as the general decline of the political discourse in the US, as well as the corruption of its politics.

not only that - the other downstream effect it gives other nations to play hardball with the US too - since they now have an alternative. say Iran gets sanctioned by the US that they can't access play store - with china's option, they don't have care about the play store. and with the web being more capable - no need for native app stores. same as those chips - before it was buying good chips from US or US ally's, next time those "rogue" nations can buy good quality chips from china.

I disagree with "there's really no reason". The reason is so that app developers can easily recompile existing apps for their platform with some minimal changes. If their system is completely incompatible, then it's probably a much bigger effort to build apps from scratch and many companies might not do it.

This is my take as well.

I see this as likely in the same vein as Google copying the Java APIs. The similarity is important because of the compatibility it brings.

So there's very much still an incentive to care about what Android does, and what API interfaces it exposes (at least in the transitional period).

Whether that will still be true a decade or two from now is a different question.

In fact, due to the promotion of the Communist Party of China, almost all Chinese companies will adapt to Huawei's mobile phone system.

At this point the Play Store is probably more valuable than Android for phone makers. It doesn't matter that Huawei has a new operating system, if it has no apps, or just lack the ones people really need.

Depending on the country that's going to be some mobile payment options, banking apps, social media or government ID. If even one of those are missing, people will pick another brand, something with the Play Store.

I mean - developers for your platform have always been a huge driver (something something developers, developers, developers - Balmer).

But I think it's a mistake to assume that the Play Store is equivalent to your developer footprint for a platform.

Google has been fairly insidious about integrating OS level APIs with the Play Store, so that's blurred the line a bit here - but if the OS is otherwise "Android-like" enough that it's just a matter of choosing a different target in your build and linking to different binaries... it'll be very easy to port over the developer base that's interested.

Seems like Harmony is doing exactly that, and already has a large swath of companies that are planning to support the OS - so while some of that is likely because of government influence in this case... it's not required (ex - I'm thinking of Google and the whole lawsuit with Oracle around the Java APIs)

It doesn't matter that you have 90% of all developers supporting your platform, if the final 10% is responsible for the must have apps.

Huawei had a 4% market share last year. Is that going to be enough for something like MobilePay in Scandinavia to ensure that they are present on a platform, from a company and country they don't entirely trust? Without the MobilePay app, the number of people who'd buy the phones drop to almost zero. The same happens if Danes can't use their government ID on the phones, sales drops to almost zero, because the device just lost a major feature.

I don't think it matters that Huawei has a large swath of companies ready to support their OS, it has to be all of them (or at least the right ones).

They might pull it off and get every one on board, but the investment has to be really small to justify the work for such a small user base.

Huawei has 22% market share in China which has its own ecosystem, so apps can be converted. Even for Xiaomi and BBK it will make sense to have few China only Harmony phones to hedge against any action by US against them.

Countries like Iran, Russia can be next target for obvious reasons.

In SEA likes of Grab and Gojek can be financially motivated to create apps. If they get a 4-10% marketshare it will make sense for Meta to port its apps to protect its position.

YouTube will be a blocker as Google has strong reason to not support any alternative platform even if it will make sense for the App. Same happened for Win Phone earlier.

The most popular apps in China will run on Huawei's OS. That's all Huawei really needs at the moment.

I just looked up WeChat and Douyin, for example, and they are working on HarmonyOS versions: [0].

0. https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3267411/huaweis-h...

Notably, this is a microkernel, multiserver operating system[0].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS_NEXT

Looks like a whole new OS to find exploitation for. Interesting.

I find it interesting how Huawei was able to make a nearly brand new microkernel operating system in a short amount of time, meanwhile Google with Fuchsia...

Despite it being Huawei, I am interested to see how well the OS plans out.

Honestly, I think Fuchsia was fine, there's just no reason to deploy it yet.

Didn't Google deploy it to some of its smart speaker devices a while ago tho?

Yes, https://9to5google.com/2024/03/01/fuchsia-16-nest-hub-whats-...

However it is quite clear by now, this is the best Fuschia will ever get, and it is mostly a top level software engineer retention program.

It's a shame because Fuchsia would go a long way to solve the Android update mess that's partially caused by how Linux does drivers/kernels for ARM and that Android was never made to have generic updates like desktop operating systems, much of the design stemming from the embedded world it was originally made for.

Time to... (check notes)... break up Google and somehow sanction Google so they themselves can't use Android anymore and you get Fuchsia on the Pixel line. That's how you push alternative OS thesedays.

Fuchsia was a success for its developers: they created something new and shiny at Google, which would allow them to receive their promotion.

HarmonyOS NEXT is probably a lot more existential for Huawei.

That is a good example of how politics are much more relevant than technical achivements, and anyone that dispels technology based on failure to gather mainstream adoption is lacking the whole picture.

Certainly Fuchsia failed on the brand front with so many people misspelling it as Fuscia (:

That should have been obvious from the get go, no chance most people are going to spell that correctly

It's more of an internal name like Darwin/XNU is for Apple.

They could of just made it a new version of Android.

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41934156 for more details

Huawei is very present at EuroRust and seem to look for a lot of people to hire.

I guess it makes sense, I was curious why they would want people to work on e.g. Servo since Firefox is already available on Android... now I know :) Their team there made a pretty good impression for the record, they were knowledgeable and pitched their projects quite well (several of them quite interesting).

I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that L4 kernel was an inspiration.

>Unlike previous iterations of HarmonyOS, HarmonyOS NEXT no longer supports Android apps.

That's kind of big, HarmonyOS would not be just another Android flavor anymore.

> we're sorry to report that Huawei told us it currently has no plans to offer Harmony OS NEXT outside of China

That's to be expected. If you live outside of China and don't know Mandarin, the apps are not usable.

thanks; that explains why the en and ru variants of https://developer.huawei.com/consumer/cn/develop/ have limited information.

> If you live outside of China and don't know Mandarin

Not just that, China has super apps that integrate everything from payments, food delivery, taxi, social media... To single application. Integrating this app directly into OS as a launcher (or shell) kind of makes sense.

Sounds nice at first until you look to see what places these apps are also linked too in mainland China.

But not that it matters in the end considering the chaos the US has where eventually everyone gets to see what we do on our cells to. It is just a matter of speed, China is probably just more efficient.

Are you sure those everything aren't just bunch of third party janky WebViews, only relevant because of private chat app account moat?

("third party" and "private" parts are relevant, IMO, otherwise Twitter superapp-ification had happened years ago)

Maybe, but that is just implementation detail.

My point is that 3td party apps do not make much sense in China. They are useless without support from super app

That's same everywhere. If your phone didn't support local equivalents of VISA, Google, Uber, iMessage, Amazon, ... it's just Mainland China equivalents of services and slightly different implementation of federated login/payment. People tends to assume that the set of brands they recognize is truly universal and global and others are additive, that's not the reality.

There are Chinese regional apk distribution sites for Chinese phones. You don't hear about those(I don't either) because there are near zero communication bandwidth across languages on this planet. That doesn't mean they don't exist.

> China has super apps that integrate everything from payments, food delivery, taxi, social media... To single application.

I mean, you're simply describing an operating system. The west builds this as an operating system. China builds it as an app. The rise of the Chinese super-apps is literally just a response to the reality that the West, especially Apple, forces everyone they work with to think inside the App box. Uber has to build an app if they want to access Apple's customers; but with the Uber app adding delivery, its also becoming a little Super.

The more interesting question is why the west doesn't have super-apps similar to the east. The reality, which I hinted to, is that I think we're starting to see more of them; Uber has delivery, Spotify is adding audiobooks, Google is adding an AI assistant, I think the scope-creep of these apps should give you a clue as to why China built them first.

There's certainly cultural aesthetic differences; maybe the west places greater importance on simplicity and focus. I think the bigger reason is market dynamics. The west has a relatively far more competitive market among these goods and services providers. The primary fuel funding technology companies over the past twenty years has been venture capital, which is attracted to younger, newer companies over the old established players. But, venture capital is slowing down, the marketplace is calcifying a bit among the established players, both new ones from the VC boom and old ones which survived it: And now we're starting to see these players branch out from their core competency and become more-and-more super-appy as they pursue greater growth with less fear that a startup is going to drive-by and eat their lunch.

Part of the motivation for Musk's rebranding of the Great Banality Laser as X is that he wants to turn it into a sort of super-app with payments, shopping, etc.

That and he just has a kooky fascination with the letter X.

What would they offer outside China? They still don’t have access to android.

I never remember the clear lines.

I think they're bared from US distribution and PlayStore being Google is a no-go.

But they're not banned in the EU nor SEA or anywhere outside the US really, and the open source part of android is also probably fair game.

It feels like refocusing on the Chinese market only is a business move more than a limitation of what they can do.

Perhaps Xiaomi is putting too much market pressure to make it viable to them ?

While they can sell phones in the EU, having no access to the closed parts of Android is a big deal, as it brings problems with many everyday needs like banking apps.

In my country, Spain, Huawei was the market leader with over 28% market share:

https://e00-expansion.uecdn.es/assets/multimedia/imagenes/20...

Since the ban, their market share suddenly plunged and is now 3%, and obviously the reason is lack of Google services.

I myself stopped buying Huawei phones despite thinking that they were far superior to other brands (Xiaomi is a joke compared to the reliability of Huawei products, my 2019 Huawei P30 Pro is still in active use by my wife and its battery lasts for more than a day after close to five years. She didn't want to "update" to a newer Pixel 6 Pro since the battery was much worse). But I don't have time to spend on periodically hacking the phone to get access to Google services when an update makes the previous hack stop working.

They do sell quite a lot of Android phones in Russia, but those come without Google apps. They have their own app store, Huawei AppGallery, and I see that logo fairly often next to Apple app store and Google Play.

>Huawei hopes to bring its OS to PCs, too. Last month the chair of the Chinese giant's consumer business group, Yu Chengdong, revealed it would no longer run Windows on its future machines, but Harmony OS instead

That is very interesting. And considering that Harmony OS is not based on Android and Linux, I would be curious to see it running on a PC.

Seems similar to (though a shortcut version of) Apple sharing mobile and desktop hardware/software tech.

> Huawei did try to export the last version of the OS – and even offered assistance to developers who coded for the platform and targeted offshore markets – without success.

I wonder if they really tried or if they just suck too much. I thought about getting invested into the eco-system. The technical details of NEXT are quite interesting; however, the on-boarding is literal garbage. I still, to this day, can't sign up for a Huawei ID and I am currently located in Asia.

You can really see Huawei’s roots as a telecom vendor here.

Their hardware, firmware, and core parts of the software are nearly flawless, at least compared to Apple/Google in 2024, but the moment you need something beyond the shipped product it becomes a hoop jumping exercise. And the documentation is much worse.

Indeed. I don't have much technical expertise in the kernel/OS space, but I wouldn't be surprised if the NEXT OS is better than Linux. On the other hand, their dev experience is akin to opening a router paper manual. There is an opportunity here but I am not sure how it can be unlocked.

> I wouldn't be surprised if the NEXT OS is better than Linux.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's full of shortcuts with privilege escalations or contradicting exceptions.

Not because it's Huawei, but because it's a single company developing BOTH the Operating System and the hardware it is supposed to be deployed in.

When it comes to meeting a production deadline of a product, the pressure to apply a quick workaround is much much higher than the pressure to follow a structured process from whatever platform-team.

Source: I worked in lots of companies which at some point tried to establish various kinds of frameworks, just to be forced to break them again in order to ship on-time...

>it's a single company developing BOTH the Operating System and the hardware it is supposed to be deployed in

That's what Apple has been doing for nearly 20 years now.

Sure but they've had time to refine theirs, and MacOS is based on MACH/XNU and OpenBSD, Huawei HarmonyOS NEXT is apparently fully new, so lots of ways things could go wrong

Yes, with a very limited portfolio and mainly shipping to end-users, after breaking compatibility on every major release for 20 years before that.

---

If you expect that Huawei will:

delay a million-device mass-production for i.e. China Mobile because the project-team needs to wait for the platform-division to implement a fix in their common core and complete the entire release-process, for the project-team to then merge their code again on-top of this new release and start retesting the impact of all the other patches,

-> instead of:

the project-team just patching their fork of the platform, release a new build for China Mobile immediately and take a note to "deal with this later"

then you have not seen the reality of this industry yet.

Even Huawei's existing products are a multitude of forked and re-forked codebases with changes left and right, updated/outdated libraries and ever-pending merge-tasks. I don't expect this to suddenly change now

But, do we somehow know that it isn't based on Linux? The fact alone that it will not run Android apps doesn't bar that.

From what I’ve heard it’s a much smaller microkernel, so it’s improbable for it to be based on Linux.

I can only say that, going through the filesystem of the emulator, I saw a .so for SELinux, which makes me extremely suspicious

Huawei or other Chinese companies are not particularly good at developer support. Maybe it's cultural or large corp or both. I have heard some bad stories about Ali cloud too. They are usable, but not particularly easy to use.

in agreement bro. their ECS equivalent's pages are still in hanzhi making it quite a pain to use.

Yeah they don't care too much about developer experience.

The irony of blocking technology is that when the blocked ones are big enough, eventually this isn't a problem, and it will only weaken the position of the blockers, as their influence gets reduced.

And who knows, maybe this is the seredepity point to end US monopoly on mobile OSes.

There is a saying in Eastern Europe that the biggest driver of innovation is American sanctions. This seems to be the case here.

I wonder the cost to Microsoft if there is a rigorous political effort by the CCP to move all Chinese desktop consumption away from Windows and Office Suite to open source (local) alternatives.

That's a cost to microsoft, sure, but probably a much bigger cost to china.

I like Linux, but porting a country's software on linux is no trivial task.

Then have been at it for a while now,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flag_Linux

Also maybe EU should start thinking in better supporting SuSE or something like that.

A lot Chinese software was created for Windows XP or Win7. Keeping such software running on modern windows can be quite expensive. Many of them do not even have legal windows license.

Add security concerns... What happens if windows activation server goes down? Or Microsoft pushes some hostile patch?

Today, Linux with Wine can be the easiest way to run old windows software.

That is the beauty of web. Most end users now interact via web. They have popular alternative to Office, teams, slack etc.

So even if 40-70% of corporate computers can be moved out it's still big.

China has been doing this for a while already. Not only porting a country's software on Linux, they are also porting to their own platforms. [1] [2] [3] [4]

Currently it's full of rough edges and barely (if at all) works. But I do believe it's going to happen.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson

[2] https://www.phytium.com.cn/homepage/production/15/ (Chinese-only)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunway_(processor)

[4] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/huawei-bring...

I think it is good that we have a non-Google, non-Apple OS for mobile phones out there though I am guessing that the surveillance state will be in full operation in Harmony OS as well.

The reason Huawei has a distinct non-Google Android flavour poisons the whole endeavour. Huawei is registered on the US Entity List.

You can have the surveillance gulag of Google, or the surveillance gulag of the CCP. Pick your poison.

https://grapheneos.org/ Which has it's own set of issues, but there are choices.

I am way too much of a small fry for the CCP to give a single fuck about me.

Google, on the other hand, can have a massive influence on my day to day life.

The more incompatible mobile OSes, the more the Web will come back. Cool.

> Huawei makes divorce from Android official

What do I read as a non-native speaker?

> Now you can divorce easily using Android phone from Huawei

The spyware in Chinese phones can make divorce easier, yes.

As opposed to US spyware?

Yeah well if you’re in the US you can’t really dodge US spyware, but you can dodge Chinese spyware.

Carve out your sovereignty where you can, yknow?

If you're in the US you should be dodging US spyware not Chinese spyware, since you're living under US power and laws.

Why not both? I don’t want china knowing about me any more than I want the US knowing about.

It’s harder to dodge US spying when every other traffic light has network connected cameras on them… and I pay taxes… there’s no dodging it.

It’s much easier to not buy Chinese spyware phones.

How many laws does the US have, and are you 100% sure you haven't broken any ever?

No such thing. Instead we have corporate America spyware. And America using court power to access corporate spyware data.

You see this way America never gets spyware status. Neither does America get powerful enough that its backers become afraid of America.

>And America using court power to access corporate spyware data.

No, America doesn't need the courts to access the data from the corporations because the corporations just sell it to law enforcement.

Every single American company that touches computers has an enthusiastic side hustle as a snitch.

Being a snitch is a good thing because if you do a crime using their services, then you lose the right to privacy. Blanket surrender of data is not.

"Divorce" here means "separate entirely". So

> Huawei makes divorce from Android official means "Huawei has officially separated from Android and will no longer be using it in any way".

yeah, later I understood, but after a third or fourth reading...

The os seems to be kind of open source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenHarmony

From my understanding OpenHarmony is different from Harmony NEXT. The later is proprietary.

I believe Harmony NEXT is built on top of OpenHarmony?

Very interesting wikipedia info:

Written in: C, C++, JavaScript, ArkTS, Cangjie,[1] Rust, Assembly language and others

https://developer.huawei.com/consumer/cn/cangjie/ (many alternative natural languages available in the dropdown; none of the ones I tried currently map) Looks algolish.

EDIT: according to https://blog.csdn.net/qiushi_1990/article/details/140528431 from 19.07.2024 those are the languages supported for writing apps, not necessarily the implementation language(s) for the μk?

> - 多语言开发支持支持多种语言开发如ArkTS和C/C++ 进一步提升了应用性能。

EDIT2: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/鸿蒙星河版 lists C,C++,Java

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41934156 :

> The core kernel of HM is implemented primarily in a confined subset of C, consisting of 90k lines of code (LoC), which includes the basic functionalities. All other OS services are decoupled and can be deployed individually, totaling over 1 million LoC. The HM’s build system can assemble the OS services based on detailed configurations specified for various scenarios, such as placing OS services in different isolation classes or coalescing some OS services.

Hate to see this but Chinese phones have been better than US phones for almost half a decade now.

They may have started with stolen IP, but they're actually just ahead now - thinner, faster, lighter, better.

This applies to hardware, but their software isn't bad either - 15 years in most phone OS are kind of the same shit with only minor differences.

But sure Google, Apple, Microsoft keep trying to sell us shitty services for your balance sheet and ignoring what got you dominant i.e. building great products.

Also before they have something that's code was readable and people can see what the hell backdoors they have put. Now it's home run for surveillance

exactly how we can read the MacOS, Windows and all the Google apps code that are bundled with virtually every Android phone, right?

Exactly how we can read source of Linux distros, GrapheneOS and multitude of other security focused Android forks, right.

Thanks for your 0.001% solution (which included me when I had a lot of spare time)

Now name a brand that sells grapheneOS phones

If you live in the west and criticise your government, nothing happens. If you live in China and criticise your government, even in private, you can go missing or end up in a camp

This is very over simplified and glossing over a huge amount of political repression that happens in the west just because it's more sophisticated. Don't fool yourself into thinking you're free because you're not in China. You would realize this the second you go against any powerful interests

Try telling that to all those people punished for protesting against Gaza genocide. Not to mention Julian Assange.

Julian Assange was wanted for publishing confidential documents, not speaking out against the government.

Yes, publishing confidential documents that expose government crimes, including war crimes. On the one hand, people argue for things like free speech and human rights, but on the other hand, the same people play petty semantics games to cover up their own society's shortcomings. Are you truly a supporter of free speech and human rights, or are you just anti-$OTHER_GROUP? Behavior like this are actively harmful to the ideals of free speech and human rights.

The documents Assange published also included lots of information on civilians in places like Afghanistan who had worked against groups like the Taliban. That put those people at risk of retaliation.

It's not really very pro human rights to go around doxing the people who are working for human rights in those places. There was nothing in the government crimes or alleged crimes in the documents that needed to be released before the documents had been thoroughly reviewed and the information on people not involved redacted.

> It's not really very pro human rights to go around doxing the people who are working for human rights in those places. There was nothing in the government crimes or alleged crimes in the documents that needed to be released before the documents had been thoroughly reviewed and the information on people not involved redacted.

This is the big difference I see with the Edward Snowden case, the papers that published the leaked documents attempted to redact any information that could put people at risk.

Assange and Wikileaks just went fuck it and didn't even try to stay politically neutral.

Still nothing compared to china. But nice try.

What? Somehow people in the west getting arrested for protesting against genocide, is acceptable/redeemable just because another country is presumably worse??? Do you actually care about freedom/human rights at all or are you just abusing those concepts to feel superior relative to other countries and to play petty tribal us-vs-them politics?

Usually not arrested for protesting. It usually for trespassing or vandalisation or something else. Or sometimes something stupid like blocking traffic

When $NON_WESTERN_COUNTRY arrests people for, let's say, "picking quarrels", people here usually see that as just an excuse for cracking down on activities that go against government interests. But when western countries do the same, people take those excuses at face value???

didn't say it was ok to arrest people protesting. Just that it's nothing comparable with non-democratic countries like china or russia. You can protest in front of the white house. Just don't try that in moscow or beijing.

You can do stuff in front of the White House as long as you're a nobody and it doesn't actually threathen powerful interests. How many of these protests where nobody was arrested, actually resulted in change? What's the point of protesting if nothing ever changes? Thousands of children have already been killed in Gaza, but we can protest in front of the White House while the killing continues, and that makes us better than $OTHERCOUNTRY. Why are you content with a circus like that? What's even the point of comparing with $OTHERCOUNTRY if you don't have effective power to change for the better at home? Shouldn't we set higher standards for ourselves?

I think it's really, really weird that some people care more about how bad $OTHER is than problems at home.

i think a wide majority of americans are perfectly fine with the way israel responded after oct 7, and that is why the US policy doesn't change.

I'm happy a handful of people protesting can't impact a policy, that would be anti-democratic.

Nice try

But I don't live in China

Edit: anyway it's a false premise, China has 1.4 billion people living there, do you really think 1.4 billion people do not criticize ever the government? USA has the highest rate of incarceration per capita in the World, there a say that goes "the biggest prize a journalist can win it's not the Pulitzer, it's being killed by the CIA" the DoD is the largest emplyer in the world, NSA has the largest budget in the world, I do not believe it's all spent in defense (DoD used to be named department of war) and oversimplification doesn't really explain things it only keeps stereotypes alive IMO.

At least now I can choose who to spy on me.

You mean that now you can choose who to give your data to for free.

Everyone is spying on you.

No, instead of Five Eyes I’ve only One Eye on me.

I'd say that if you were worried before that on Chinese phones running Android there is something malicious but having some open source variant somewhere was protecting you somehow... you weren't paying much attention in this space for last decade+

It seems like Chinese app developers will want some sort of middle layer that they write to in order to get compatibility. Obviously, a lot of developers currently use cross-platform toolkits, but it's unclear how well the popular ones will support something that is strictly for the Chinese market.

Huawei's innovations are shadowed by its deep corruption and ties with the CCP. Chinese activists have been targeted and had their apps repacked and resigned by Huawei without notification.

Google isn't an Angel but I'll take the skynet we know vs the skynet we don't.

I would be more interested in a OpenHarmony Desktop version. If it picks up on mainland and Asia in general it would be a proper 3rd desktop OS.

3rd desktop os? There are many more than 2 desktop oss already, am I misunderstanding you?

I guess they mean proper as in significant marketshare.

I meant this proper as in significant marketshare.

There are only two kernel architectures in use though: Unix-derived and Windows. This could make for a very different new entry

I haven't seen anything to suggest that the new Huawei OS will use a unique kernel architecture.

a microkernel is already different to linux.

the top answer on https://www.zhihu.com/question/640078375/answer/3367442919 suggests it was based on the Minix 3 μk, but the bottom answer claims it's greenfield development.

(someone who cares more than I do could buy one of the devices listed in the middle answer and enlighten us as to what's on it?)

EDIT: looks not-minixy to me, according to Huawei's OSDI slides: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41934156

It is not Minixy derivative, there is no Unix-like, it's access control is hybrid of traditional role based and capability-based on distributed OpenHarmony operating system base with a distributed file system, on a distributed operating system distro of HarmonyOS. And the kernel module structure is far different on MINIXY https://codedocs.org/what-is/minix-3 HarmonyOS 4.2 uses mature security defense mechanisms such as SELinux, Seccomp, Namespace, and Capability (iOS 17 uses Sandbox and Entitlement to achieve similar effects). HarmonyOS NEXT has designed a CAPABILITY SYSTEM on top of existing defense mechanisms to restrict access to kernel functions and verify IPC permissions.

In HarmonyOS NEXT, kernel objects are used as carriers for data transmission during IPC communication. The CAPABILITY SYSTEM ensures that only those with the capability to read from or write to kernel objects can receive or send messages through these objects. As a result, the content of messages cannot be accessed by malicious processes. DarkNavy ethical cybersecurity group in China tested Huawei's HarmonyOS Next custom kernel earlier this year with a report released in June. https://www.darknavy.org/blog/avss_report_kernel/ and the toolchain is exposed: https://harmonyoshub.com/harmonyos-next-leak-exposes-the-in-...

I meant in potential marketshare, while linux is widely used for desktop(professional users), i wouldn't say it has a lot of marketshare tho. So consumer software support will be limited.

Is it a new Linux distro (cool) or just another android fork that... can't run android apps (lame)?

So you are telling below you have nothing running linux? Lol

Hey, Tim Sweeney now has a third platform he can put the Epic Games Store and Fortnite on!

... except I bet we'll never see either of those come to HarmonyOS.

His friends at Tencent might have the desire and capability to do so.

If I were a CCP official I'd even relax some video game regulations when played on HarmonyOS to increase adoption. Under the guise of it having more 'safety' features or something like that.

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